Greenpeace

Even the most hardened anti-environmentalist would be hard pressed to not be moved by the disaster that has taken over the Gulf of Mexico. BP has, for the past six weeks, been fighting fires on every front as the world questioned: how on earth could this have happened? And how is it possible that the flow of oil can’t be stemmed sooner??

Now, I’m not an engineer and I can’t answer those questions. But what I do know is that BP has done no favours for itself by the way in which it’s handled the PR around the oil crisis.

The company’s failure to manage expectations and its tendency to claim premature victories have brought into question any credibility that it had to start with. The speed at which the global community has picked this up and gone to town on the oil giant has been instant. Within hours, an anonymous Tweeter set up a fake ‘BP Public Relations’ account, quoting gems such as: “Try our cap operation at home! Hold a funnel over a firehose, sell what you catch and proclaim victory!” and “We’re having an internal debate at the office. Is the Gulf of Mexico one of the Great Lakes?” Greenpeace also jumped on the bandwagon by launching its own version of the BP logo , while infamous US site The Onion summed it up in a very tongue-in-cheek blog: ‘Massive Flow Of Bullshit Continues to Gush from BP Headquarters’.

In short, BP’s speed of response at controlling the messaging around the crisis – across every channel – has been too slow. It demonstrates the power of a good crisis management plan and importance of being able to control communications from the outset, when things go wrong.

Now, the question has to be asked: with a disaster of such a magnitude, can any amount of PR help protect BP’s reputation? Well, not in its entirety. What PR can do, is retain the company’s credibility as an honest source of information (if not a responsible oil provider!) and ensure that you’re communicating in a clear and consistent way.

So everyone knows by now that social media is kind of a big deal. And most brands have grudgingly started to engage in one way or other – some more successfully than others. The issue now then is that many brands are just paying lip service to it.

Sceptics take note though… Last week, Nestle discovered exactly how much damage can be inflicted on a global brand that fails to have a watertight social media strategy, when they became the unwilling target of a viral and social media campaign launched by Greenpeace.

The campaign was designed to undermine Nestle’s Fairtrade claims by drawing attention to its use of palm oil sourced from Sinar Mas – an Indonesian company accused of illegal deforestation.

It all started with a viral spoof of Nestle’s famous ‘Have a break, have a Kit Kat’ ad, in which an office worker was seen to bite into an Orang-utan’s finger, instead of a chocolate wafer finger…. Within hours however, Greenpeace and anti-Nestle activists has turned the viral into a fully-fledged social media attack on the brand, with people using Twitter and Facebook to openly criticise the confectionary giant and call for a boycott on its products.

So far then, all pretty standard techniques for social media campaigning… The point at which it became a social media crisis for Nestle however, was when the brand tried to shut down social media by either deleting posts from its Twitter and Facebook pages, with one company response reading: “We welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic – they will be deleted.” A later comment from the company then read: “Social media: as you can see we’re learning as we go. Thanks for the comments.”

The company’s poor attempts to manage the situation through social media resulted in a massive drop in the price of Nestle shares just 24 hours after the campaign broke, as noted on the Viral Agency blog. Coincidence? Perhaps… but almost certainly a contributing factor.

The lesson from this then is that NO brand can afford to just pay lip service to social media. Social media experts now need to form a pivotal member of any communications team. Undervalue the impact that the medium can have at your peril.

Limelight

Our business is all about ideas and energy. So what better theme to base our blog around. You will find here a collection of thoughts, reactions and opinions about the ideas and energy that's inspiring us at the moment.